


Post-smog

by Transistance



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Bloodlust, Demons, F/M, Reapers, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 01:08:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10232246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: Killing demons is easy now - if time has gifted Grell anything, it's that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Ey, hope everyone's doing well these days! It's been a while. No more angst pieces from me, I hope.

All the deep smog in the world cannot screen the moonlight from the slate roofs and rain-slick spires on cloudless nights like these; the air is alight and so are those who move amongst the dark, headlamp eyes and fluid motions half-visible, filled with careless grace as demon and reapers alike dance their way through another bloody dusk. All the smog in the world can't shield the hunted from their pursuit; humans are trailed by monsters after whom creep angels and nightmares, taking rooftops like playing fields and retaliation as a selling point for any given mission.

The sky is cold and midnight has cast the dark into the crystal magic of pre-morning already, and as Grell inhales the smoke that caresses her face with all the intimacy of any careful lover she decides that she really does feel alive. Her prey moves on the street below her, weaving in and out of alleyways and from side to side of the street, staggering like a drunk as it homes in on her listed household. There are three of them; three low level demons approaching a slum-dwelling old widow's bedside, intent on consuming one old, battered soul.

Grell is going to kill them all.

The first step is the hardest. It always is – when she puts one foot forward and finds no resistance to the fall, it is as always a little disconcerting until she hits the ground clean and moves from the crouch into flight. The uncertainty, the fear – it only lasts a second, but anticipation of its magnitude has always been a problem. The problem. Her heels catch the cobblestone and click, click; predatory now, intimidation embodied in the sound – and she relishes it. Her motion is sure and absolute, what once had been difficult to walk in now only enabling her speed – and by the time the first demon begins to turn, the first fringes of a frown touching his artless face, she has already torn through him. The chainsaw sings as it rends him in two, and the reaper's soul sings with it. Her heels hammer home across cobblestones even as her motor roars, and she knows that she is the essence from which terror is brewed.

The first step is the hardest. Taking freefall from the lofty heights of safety to embrace the uncertainty that risk brings-- after the first day of wearing heels to the office she shouldn't worry, and yet ever since there has been a moment in the morning where tying her laces feels like tightening the noose. It's asphyxiating, thrilling; and when she strides forward as herself those around her lower their eyes and part their lips only to have the words stolen by her aura. Unease incarnate – they fear her, and she loves it.

London holds her like its own, dead adoptee so at home within its streets; her hair is a comet trail behind her, her colour a warning, and the sprint can't take enough of her breath to stop her laughter. The night is hers and the second demon's scent is in her nose as much as the stench of the street; he's getting steadily closer and although he must feel her approach already there's nothing he can do to prevent the inevitable. One she's in her element Grell cannot be stopped; for all those who would control her try with harsh words, hard hands, barbed policies and punishments – they are left bitter in her wake always, because reapers need capable field agents, and Grell is killer, incandescent; for all they try to change her she always manages to find herself again.

Grell Sutcliff is fire and death and the streets are hers, the night is her; for all that she is dead she will never be put to rest. Not by demons and not by _them_.

The second foe takes her head on, snarling. It's rather larger than the first – black eyes melt into the dark, and its claws almost touch her. She leaps as it lunges, meets its eyes as she passes over its jaws, and swipes upward as she lands. The demon lurches backward not quickly enough, entangled in its own cumbersome misunderstanding of how she should be attacking, and she's aware of how her cheeks ache from her grin as she finishes it. Her scythe eats into its chest with as much glee as she feels, and red has always been her colour. Demon blood washes out, eventually.

It's like they line up waiting to be defeated – her issues, her demons, and each tally mark feels like an achievement. She's making good time now. The third will be almost upon the soul, and almost in the grip of death itself.

Every day in the academy, mocked. Grell's feet punch against the ground, carrying her forward with as much strength as she's ever had – because certainty makes her _strong_. Every brush stroke of makeup, every fleck of eyeliner feeling like a death mask, a beacon drawing critique and disgust – the most efficient reaper in England powers her way toward her final quarry, her muscles working, her body alight; the rush makes her feel immense, at once complete and all-consuming. Her mind sits perfect within her perfect body, beautiful and functional even though every single other feels she shouldn't be; no reaper should be able to move so cleanly in that get-up, no creature can be sane to wish deviance from the gifts biological birth has brought them. No man should have the heart of a woman and no women has the head to reap, and Grell is the truth that proves the lie to all of this and more; Grell herself is the answer to her own happiness and always has been. She is perfection, statuesque, an alabaster warrior – because the more her skin has felt like her own the more deadly she has become, and the closer she comes to womanhood the more she understands herself to be a miracle amongst the dead who walk and work in all hues of grey. She is radiant, and this makes her invincible.

She knows herself and those who tried to change her have sunk into the past and let her be, and now she finds the purr of a chainsaw between her palms as companionable as the warmth of any man, the raw whispers on night air more homely than the hum of a soulless office. If she is broken then so is everyone else, and that's an easy notion to make peace with.

The door is ajar but her intent is fierce so Grell angles herself and crashes though a window in a maelstrom of glass and noise, alighting easily on her feet and ripping through the last demon even as it steps toward the dying human, even as the other reaper starts out from the shadows of the corner of the room. The blood spatters across the musty room and the demon falls with a cry even as the woman on the bed gives a sigh and passes away, and Grell's coworker barely alters his movement to flick his scythe round and drive it into the corpse's chest.

“You're late, Grell Sutcliff,” he says without looking up from the reels. “By almost three minutes.”

For a moment this rebuke catches Grell in the gut, as though it's something new – covered in blood she stands over the ruined body of her last scheduled victim, perfectly on time and vibrant, breathing heavily, half waiting for an acknowledgement that he will, of course, never give – but then she's on her feet again, smiling again, and as the tail of the reel disappears into William's scythe Grell throws an arm around his shoulders, easy as anything, and replies, “ _Fashionably_ late, dear. The demon was never going to be a bother.” Pressing her streaked lips to his cheek is what makes him shake her off, as he has a thousand times before. The way he tuts disapproval, slight and quiet, makes her grin as widely as it always has. He's her largest obstacle, her most insidious demon, the one who disapproves of her the most – and yet in his company she finds it so hard not to smile and smile and smile.

One day, he will smile back.


End file.
